25 January 2012 9:23 AM

A Quango of Lord Chief Justices and a back door route to drug decriminalisation?- The new drugs sentencing guidelines

Our leading liberal lawyers on the Sentencing Guidelines Council have got it wrong. That is of course if today’s new guidelines are not disingenuous.

The Lord Chief Justices who lead it have decided, in their wisdom, for the first time, to set comprehensive guidelines on how the role of the offender and the quantity of drugs should influence sentencing. Is this necessary? No. Does is address what is really problematic about drugs sentencing? No.

We have a Misuse of Drugs Act which clearly sets out the penalties for supply and possession for three classes of drugs. It was passed in 1971. It protects the public from harmful, toxic and addictive substances that could and should never get through our system of drug registration on grounds of safety, quality or efficacy.

No government since has believed it should be changed - a stance backed by the bulk of the public. In fact polling suggests the number of people who think our drug law is too liberal is going up. This is hardly surprising in view of its lax application.

But the Sentencing Council thinks otherwise. Whatever it’s stated aim, the new guidelines make official what is already ‘de facto’ – that is the decriminalisation of drug possession and supply on our streets. These guidelines change the law by the back door - something that neither Parliament nor government has a mandate for, less alone has debated.

What problem do the Law Lords think they will solve? Empty our prisons? Hardly. Not in view of what really happens to those convicted of drug offences. For despite the huge amounts of cocaine and heroin entering the country and the quantities consumed, what is startling is how few suppliers and dealers end up in prison.

You can forget the hype about prisons being full of drug offenders. They aren’t. Or if they are that is not what they are in for, or have been caught for. In fact we have the lowest and laxest rate of custodial sentences for drug offences in Europe. The supposedly liberal Netherlands has a custodial rate twenty times higher than ours. We focus on cautions and warnings – not even on fines and asset seizures which the Netherlands also exacts far more of.

But the Sentencing Council and its side kick, the Government’s Sentencing Advisory Panel, have never been backward in coming forward to advise leniency. Just two years ago the latter, no doubt in preparation for future liberalisation, singularly announced that long prison sentences for drug barons were not a deterrent. Really?

Well, of course they are not a deterrent if so few drug barons ever receive one.

In the past four years, only two life sentences have been handed out for simple supply, both in 2008.

As Peter Hitchens reported last year even for *supply* of Class ‘A’ drugs (supposedly so serious that the maximum sentence is ’life’ in prison, which of course doesn’t mean anything of the kind), 774 out of 2, 530 convicted offenders did not go to prison at all, let alone for life. For the similar offence of ‘Possession with Intent to supply, the figures are higher but the proportions are similar, 3687 sentenced, 908 imprisoned, one for life).

The key research this advisory panel bases its non deterrence theory on actually says no such thing. What it does tell us is that while dealers view prison as an occupational hazard, or an ‘unlikely risk’, they will go to considerable lengths to minimise their chance of arrest. A bit different.

But then the Advisory Panel listens to what it wants to hear. Penalties for drugs offences don’t deter the street users and dealers either, they insist. This is what the lobby group they invited to submit ‘evidence’ thinks anyway, a view they did not hesitate to adopt. Never mind that this lobby just happened to be the self appointed United Kingdom Drug Policy Commission, chaired by a leading liberaliser of drug use – Dame Ruth Runciman.

Sentences cannot deter if they are not handed down. Despite cannabis being a Class B drug, possession and dealing offences are dealt with by warnings – nearly 87,000 of them and 20,000 by cautions. Only one in eight even get to court. Not exactly a robust intervention. Nor in this country is there any court ordered treatment option for cannabis using young people as there is in Sweden.

But rather than suggesting such robust interventions, or those successfully practiced by the US drug courts, our well meaning law lords are now telling street dealers they can escape jail even if they are taken to court. They might as well advertise this as the Pete Doherty principle. The Law Lords are not waiting for him or them to put two fingers up to the law. They are doing it for them.

And street dealers do not need to see the very high breach and non completion statistics for community sentencing, plus their extraordinary low levels of supervision involved, to know that it is a joke. Pity our children in these low level dealers’ hands as they left free to dominate the streets and push their 20 ecstasy tablets without compunction – some of them little more than children themselves, that too no doubt a mitigating circumstance. As the former Met Commissioner, Sir Iain Blair said in Leicester last year, decriminalisation is the worst of all options. It leaves the streets and public at the mercy of dealers.

The only half sensible suggestion in the Council’s new pick and mix guidelines is to deal with foreign drug mules differently. Female foreign nationals do fill up or women’s prisons and they have been vilely used and abused as mules. As a former offender and prison drug worker told me, “their Nigerian and Jamaican 'mule drivers' convince their prospective beasts of burden that the "risk is worth it" due to light sentences if they get caught. But the Nigerian and Jamaican tactic (of heroin and cocaine smuggled inside the body) is to have several 'mules' on the same flight and to tip the Customs off regarding a couple of them on each flight, to distract Customs by those identified carrying less volume and quality - allowing the others carrying the quantity and quality to sail straight through the Green channel successfully.”

Community sentences are not the answer to that – leaving the women scared and vulnerable on the streets and on benefits. The Lord Chief Justices could have done their homework better. The Operation Airbridge scheme of a few years ago worked. It needs reviving and expanding. It repatriated them. Media campaigns in their home countries warning them of 3 – 16 years in jail separated from their children worked. Such repatriations can save money, empty the women’s prisons and be humane, all at the same time.

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